The literature suggests that children exhibit low levels of habitual physical activity and that many children rarely undertake the volume of physical activity believed to confer health benefits. Therefore, there is currently considerable scope for exploring the external validity and application of child-specific effort rating scales within a physical education environment. The introduction of such scales would help to determine if children can understand and apply effort sense, and use of such a concept could aid achievement of a range of attainment targets within the health-related physical education curriculum. Such attainment targets include awareness of what happens to the body during exercise, and for the child to be able to recognise and describe how the exercise makes them 'feel' (Harris, 2000). This thesis incorporates four related studies which examine the ability of school children (aged 7 -11 years) to utilise the psychophysical concept of perceived exertion (or effort perception) during stepping ergometry, cycle ergometry, and the real-world setting of a physical education class. Since the emergence of child-specific effort rating scales, the scope for researching children's perception of exercise effort is now broader than ever before. Pictorial versions of paediatric effort rating scales have tended to depict youth cyclists; OMNI Scale of Perceived Exertion and the Cart and Load Effort Rating Scale (CALER). To address the issue of scale mode-specificity, the present studies set out to determine whether such scales could be used to assess the exertional perceptions of children engaged in other dynamic modes of exercise, such as stepping. In addition, the performance of a recently developed mode-specific (stepping) paediatric exercise scale (Bug and Bag Effort (BABE) Scale) was explored across exercise modalities. The design of the external validity study also considered the importance of children's personal scale preference.
The key outcomes of the current research were:
I. Children were able to adjust their exercise intensity (loading) to match three specific levels of perceived exertion using the Children's Effort Rating Table (CERT) and CALER Scales during an intermittent stepping protocol.
II. Children were able to reproduce objective effort [Heart Rate (HR) and Power Output (PO)] using the pictorial versions of effort rating scales (CALER and BABE) with a higher degree ofreliability compared to use of the CERT.
III. Regardless of the type of paediatric effort rating scale employed, practice improved the reliability of results.
IV. The BABE Scale was found to be a valid and highly reliable tool for quantifying children's effort perception and for regulating exercise output.
V. Children preferred the BABE Scale to the CALER Scale in these exercise studies. VI. Use of the CALER and BABE Scales produced similar results across exercise modalities (stepping and cycling), indicating that either effort rating scale may be employed during these exercise tasks. These pictorial versions of paediatric effort rating scales were found to be intermodal, both scales provided similar consistencies within exercise modes.
VII. For their normal Physical Education classes ( circuit training), children were able to use the BABE Scale to regulate their exercise effort on specific activities.
VIII. Children were more reliable in their production of exercise effort at a lower perceived exertion level (Effort Rating Level 3) during the circuit training, compared to the higher perceived exertion level (Effort Rating Level 8).
IX. Children felt more competent completing the exercise circuit with use of the BABE Scale compared to exercise circuits completed without use of the BABE Scale.
X. Recommendations for scale modifications include the addition of familiar verbal cues to all numbers, to further aid interpretation of exercise effort. x1. Further research with the BABE Scale amongst children of various ages and across different Physical Education activities is recommended. The potential for using the BABE Scale as a resource for assisting with the delivery of Health-Related Exercise within the national curriculum should be explored.
XI. Further research with the BABE Scale amongst children of various ages and across different Physical Education activities is recommended. The potential for using the BABE Scale as a resource for assisting with the delivery of Health-Related Exercise within the national curriculum should be explored.